Design a Monitoring Service
Last updated: July 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
July 26, 20252
6
3,995 solved
Design a event-driven monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This fundamentals question from Oracle's System Design Round tests whether you can reason about software design at a deep level. The interviewer expects discussion of maintainability, testability, and operational considerations.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Design a complex system component applying multiple engineering principles
- Reason about system-level trade-offs: performance, reliability, developer experience
- Discuss advanced patterns: event sourcing, CQRS, distributed transactions
- Address cross-cutting concerns: observability, security, backward compatibility
- Demonstrate depth in both theoretical foundations and practical implementation
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would you measure the performance of this component in production?
- How would you document this for other engineers?
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Core Design Principles
For the event-driven monitoring system, the following core design principles apply:
- Separation of Concerns: This principle emphasizes dividing the system into distinct components, each handlin...
Architecture
The architectural approach for this monitoring service involves:
- Microservices Architecture: We will use a microservices approach where the system is divided into smaller, independent services...
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